“Everything is contained within the universe.”
“And what contains the universe?”
“Nothing contains the universe.”
Before you declare this semantic fanangling along the lines of requiring excellent eyes to see Nothing approaching from so far down the road, consider - what is nothing? Well, it’s nothing, the empty set, and contains nothing. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have the ability to contain things; it just means that if it starts containing things, then the bit of it with the things in it stops being nothing. But the same thing goes for empty space - it stops being empty space when it’s got something in it. It’s exactly the same.
Suppose there are two empty universes, both having space but no content. They might still be distinguishable however, because space can have properties. Perhaps one universe has a volume of a trillion cubic light-years, whereas the other has a volume of a trillion trillion. Or perhaps they have a different topology — one’s a hyper-sphere, one’s a hyper-torus. Or one’s 4-dimensional and one’s 17.
So I would say that Nothing can’t have space, because then there’d be different versions of Nothing. And there should only be one Nothing. (Or zero of them.)
Why shouldn’t there be different versions of nothing? Nothing is merely the state of absence of content. There’s nothing about that that dictates or limits the kind of things you don’t have any of. I can have nothing printed on a paper, nothing in the empty set, nothing in a text file, and nothing in the set of real solutions to a math problem, and nothing in an online shopping cart, and these are all examples of ‘nothing’, despite having no commonality between them aside from their basic property of emptiness.
Also be wary that you don’t mix up the medium with the message - if you have a universe containing nothing but empty space, the universe itself is not the empty space, any more than the paper is the image printed on it, or the online shopping cart is its contents. The properties of the universe might limit the ways it can be empty, or the set of conditions that must be satisfied for it to be considered empty (for example a sheet of paper need not lack molecules to be empty of print), but it doesn’t change the fact that if it meets the conditions to be empty/contain empty space/contain nothing, then it contains nothing.
Mathematics went wrong when it started applying the useful concept of zero as a place holder to counting itself. WTF does 0 apples = 0 oranges mean other than “nothing” does not exist?
I’m confused - who is saying that 0 apples = 0 oranges, and what does that even mean? If you’re trying to say that all zeros are equal you’re grossly mistaken; compare celsius and fahrenheit.
This was my thought. Space is like a potential, something could occupy it - which gives it a positive aspect in my mind. Whereas ‘nothing’ has no positive, existent aspect. If it has existence, it’s something, not nothing.
IANAPhysicist, however, so when it comes to the nature of space itself, I’m woefully undereducated.
This brings to mind a story Isaac Asimov told about a conversation he had with editor John Campbell:
Campbell: “What do you see with your eyes closed?”
Asimov: “Nothing”
“Don’t you see darkness and occasional flashes of light?”
“Well, that’s nothing.”
“Really? What do you see with your ear?”
Okay that’s awesome. However prosthetics are tools.
Mind if I ask if you got them in an accident or as an intentional implant? I always wanted to get some implanted but I’m too afraid of a strong magnet ripping them out, or ripping them in deep. Any kind of ripping actually.
Well, there’s space and there’s space, but I suppose I could actually concede that there is a semantic difference between “space” which implies “nothing + theoretical opportunity for something” and “nothing”, which pretty much just implies “nothing”. Though, virtually all nothings we encounter in the wild include the theoretical opportunity to have something (making them spaces), because otherwise we don’t notice the nothing is there, because there’s no theoretical alternatives to the nothing to notice it by comparison to.
Yeah, I think my definition of nothing pretty much precluded our finding it in the wild ;). You’re right, this is a semantic difference; defined your way, my answer to the OP is “yes, I can imagine nothing”. I still feel like space must have some sort of property in itself, however, but since it’s intuition telling me that, I have neither the cites nor the science to argue the point.
Well, again, there is nothing, and there is nothing. The way the word is typically used it refers to the nothingness being restricted to a specific context; that is, it’s inherently bounded, literally or in an analogous way to the inside of a container. For example, there can be nothing inside a box, without the rest of the universe having to be nothing too.
With that established, to meet your original criteria, I merely need to find a “nothing” that within the space defined as its ‘inside’, is not only empty, but has no potential for even possibly containing things. That’s a little hard to do but not impossible - for example, what is inside a sphere of zero radius? Well, nothing - and there can’t be anything inside it, because the internal volume is zero. Also as a computer programmer, I constantly use an object defined in our program as EMPTY_STRING - the constant text string “”. It contains nothing, by definition, and never will, by definition.
It doesn’t mean much, but for what it’s worth, your last example - EMPTY_STRING - has altered my mental image of nothing. Your sphere of zero radius I can’t agree with - is any sphere of zero radius existent?
Would it make a difference, in regard to what I said about space, if I used the word “area”, instead?
A sphere of zero radius exists as much as any mathematically accurate sphere does, one supposes - they’re all virtual, technically. Admittedly it’s easier to build something that crudely but convincingly approximates a foot-wide sphere than it is to build something that’s supposed to convincingly mimic something of no size at all.
And yeah, my opinion of nothingness and emptiness is significantly informed by my work with virtual objects of defineable size and content in computers. Lists and the like commonly contain nothing when they’re first created; they don’t allocate their internal space until you put something into them, and they (may) delete their internal space when their last thing is removed.
I’m not sure what you mean, but it sounds arbitrarily limiting, since “area” limits you to talking about containers that exist in or embody physical space (and if you wanted to get pedantic, specifically and only two dimensional space - though I doubt you wanted to get that pedantic. ) Whereas in my line of work I find lots of empty things that don’t contain physical space - text strings, lists, files, web pages, etc.
Of course, for many of these non-physical things we’re acutely aware of the difference between “empty space” and “nothing”, because for many of those things we reduce their internal size when we want to ‘empty’ them, rather than ‘blanking them out’ and leaving the empty space inside. So we don’t consider " " empty, because we consider the space in there to be a thing itself, rather than emptiness. Presumably the reason people don’t view empty physical space this same way is because we don’t typically expect the physical space to shrink when we remove its content, in the manner of a can underwater being crushed by water pressure when the air is sucked out of it. So we still allow empty physical space to be thought of as empty, even in the cases when it doesn’t constrict to zero size as a result of being emptied.
What I really mean is - if I weren’t on Earth right now, if I were in outer space, for example, there would be “nothing” between me and my computer (maybe a few atoms, but let’s ignore that for now). But there is distance. There could be less distance, or more distance, but distance itself implies to me something. This conversation actually makes me very curious about the nature of empty space and distance itself, so I’d welcome any cites you have on the matter. You’re quite right that “2D space” is more pedantic than what I actually meant :).
I agree with you on your last point, about people not expecting empty physical space to shrink. Do you think this means physical space is something in itself, or not?
You know it could be argued that nothing is anything you’re not aware of, because when you become aware of it, it becomes something. Where as before it was nothing to you.
Accident with a Dremel and some tool steel. I also have some brass and aluminium slivers in my hand, but of course those are non-magnetic. I don’t expect the iron to last much longer, though, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot less of it than there was 3 months ago (when it got in there in the first place)
My set of cites contains nothing (;)) - I’m a computer programmer, not a physicist. I can only speculate, and speculate uninformedly at best.
If you wanted to model space and objects therein, there would be two ways to do it - roughly analogous to the difference in drawing a picture of a chessboard with the peices on it, and writing down a list of the locations of any pieces that are on the chessboard. In the former case, the empty spaces are ‘things’, in the same way that the space in " " is a thing - they ‘take up’ space, and separate distant chess pieces by virtue of their presence between them. In the latter case, the board is nonexistent, and only the pieces exist, with their locations stored as a part of their properties, and distances between being determined based on a comparison of the chess pieces’ inherent locations.
It seems safe to assume that however actual reality functions is among the set of possible models, so for the moment I’ll assume that actual realily is described by one of the above cases. Note that in either case, there is something underlying the observable reality; ther is either an invisible “fabric of reality” that is spread out like a three-dimensional chessboard upon which object sit and move around on, or there is something managing the list of objects and dictating the rules of their interaction, including interactions based on location.
From our perspective sitting here in reality able to observe and measure spaces between things, it sure seems like the first model is what’s going on. But consider - in every real-time first-person computer game, the second model is what actually underlies the images formed on the screen and the virtual world they represent. Apparent spaces between things are merely an artifact of the manner in which we’re viewing the underlying, empty-space-less data. With this as an example, it’s easy for me to imagine that what we percieve as actual reality functions similarly to a computer game simulation, under the hood. Or, alternatively, apparent empty space could actually be formed of an existent ‘meta-matter’ upon which normal matter object slide around, where the presence of this meta-matter filling the space between and around physical objects is what holds them in place and keeps them apart.
Given that either model is a possibility that could in theory model reality as it presently appears, I cannot with any level of certainy guess which is the correct model. (Or whether there’s a third model I haven’t thought of yet.)
) Whereas in my line of work I find lots of empty things that don’t contain physical space - text strings, lists, files, web pages, etc.